[jiggawatts]

Specs: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-laptop-6-for-busin...

They're using Intel because there's no other option for a Microsoft product running Windows.

Also, Intel is rapidly catching up to TSMC in the lithography race, and will leapfrog them very soon, likely by the end of this year.

The top-end model uses the Intel Core Ultra 7 165H, which is this thing: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/236851/...

It has 6 performance and 8 efficiency cores, with the peak frequency as high as 5 Ghz.

It's hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison because benchmarks are sensitive to instruction sets, available compilers, etc... but this CPU is definitely competitive with the Apple M3. E.g.:

Apple M3 scores 18,947: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M3+8+Core&id=...

Intel 165H scores 30,596: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+Ultra+7+...

The Intel laptop is 60% faster for multi-threaded workloads, but it is 19% slower for single-threaded performance.

PS: The Intel laptop comes with up to 64 GB of memory and it can build and run x86 Docker images natively. If you're a developer, it's the far more attractive option...

[fh9302]

Passmark is known to be a bad benchmark, something like Geekbench which has results that closely match with the industry standard SPEC would be a better comparison for real life performance.

M3: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/5411370

Intel 165H: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/5387822

Around the same multi-core results, significantly better single core for the M3.

[kd913]

Why would anyone be doing this on their glued in laptop? If they are needing a dev machine, are you really trying to argue this is better than the mbp, thinkpads, hps or dells?

You are claiming performance figures at what 115W max turbo? What is the max consumption on the macbook 55W on CPU, 33W on GPU?

If performance matters, they should be doing the heavy lifting remotely.

Most people will be using single threaded performance, and the key metric here for this product is what is the battery life. They didn't even give a figure for that which speaks volumes.

They didn't even bring up the pen which is the main selling point of this product (i.e. ipad pro but for Windows).

[infinityplus1]

Most people don't want desktops. So powerful laptops are preferred. Macbooks don't support Linux officially. But Intel laptops do support them. So no matter how fast and efficient Macbooks are, people will still buy decent Intel laptops instead of the best Macbooks.

[kd913]

Have you tried running Linux natively on a secureboot Surface?

If you are running Linux in a vm, both are fine.

Most people want battery life, and if someone can afford to get either of these devices, they would be better off renting their heavy compute somewhere else.

[e44858]

> Have you tried running Linux natively on a secureboot Surface?

You can turn off secureboot quite easily: https://parinzee.github.io/linux-surface-overlay/docs/Instal...

[infinityplus1]

>Most people want battery life

Maybe for their personal device. But for work provided device, who cares if it is decent enough. Most people just keep them connected to power while working on a desk anyway (in my opinion).